Reserves

A reserve is an amount of funds held in an account that expires at some stage. A credit card authorization is an example of a reserve.

The OpenTransact standard doesn’t define reserves and how to use them. But these are best practices and may be written up into a separate OpenTransact Reserve standard later.

A reserve is not the same as a payment so it is a different asset as the main payments asset. We are currently using the term derivative asset for these assets that are derived from an existing asset yet have different semantics and business rules.

Assets

The Payment service PayMe has as their primary OpenTransact URL:

https://payme.example.com/usd

They could create a derivative opentransact url at:

https://payme.example.com/usd/reserves

Transactions done there return a transaction url which in its own right an OpenTransact asset:

https://payme.example.com/usd/reserves/123123

Until the reserve expires OpenTransact transfers can be created at this which creates real transactions in the primary asset.

Applications

Reserves can be used as building blocks for exchanges and many other kind of applications including: